FITrig: A High-Performance Detection Technique for Efficient Ultra-Long-Period Pulsars

Abstract

Ultra-long-period (ULP) pulsars, a newly identified class of celestial transients, offer unique insights into astrophysics, though very few have been detected to date. In radio astronomy, most time-domain detection methods cannot find these pulsars, and current image-based detection approaches still face challenges, including low sensitivity, high false positive rate, and low computational efficiency. In this article, we develop Fast Imaging Trigger (FITrig), a GPU-accelerated, statistics-based method for ULP pulsar detection and localisation. FITrig includes two complementary approaches -- an image domain and an image-frequency domain strategy. FITrig offers advantages by increasing sensitivity to faint pulsars, suppressing false positives (from noise, processing artefacts, or steady sources), and improving search efficiency in large-scale wide-field images. Compared to the state-of-the-art source finder SOFIA 2, FITrig increases the detection speed by 4.3 times for large images ($50\mathrm{K} \times 50\mathrm{K}$ pixels) and reduces false positives by up to 858.8 times (at 6$σ$ significance) for the image domain branch, while the image-frequency domain branch suppresses false positives even further. FITrig maintains the capability to detect pulsars that are 20 times fainter than surrounding steady features, even under critical Nyquist sampling conditions. In this article, the performance of FITrig is demonstrated using both real-world data (MeerKAT observations of PSR J0901-4046) and simulated datasets based on MeerKAT and SKA Array Assembly (AA) 2 telescope configurations. With its real-time processing capabilities and scalability, FITrig is a promising tool for next-generation telescopes, such as the SKA, with the potential to uncover hidden ULP pulsars.